Thursday, November 22, 2012

As you know, we've have a shiny new online help system for SUSE Studio for a while now. One of the good things about it is that you can contribute there as well. It's pretty simple and can be done without leaving your web browser. Here's how:

Finding the page

The first step is to find the page you want to edit in the studio-help repository on Github. That's where we store the sources for the online help. You can simply browse the files there, the structure in the repository is the same as you also find in the actual help.

As an example we'll add some documentation about exporting appliance configuration, where there currently is only a stub page.

Editing the page

Github provides an Edit button on the page where the file is displayed. When you click it some magic happens, the repository gets forked, so you have your private branch of this file now. It also opens an editor, so you can edit page right in your web browser.

We'll add some new content. The format is Markdown, which is a simple text format, which can be read and written by humans as well as computers, e.g. for generation of web pages in HTML.

When you want to see how the markdown will be rendered, you can click the Preview button in the editor and you'll get the text displayed mostly as it will also be shown on the actual SUSE Studio help page.

Creating a pull request

At the bottom of the editor there is a button "Propose file change". Clicking this button will create a patch containing all your changes. Go to the main page of your fork then, and you'll see the patch listed there.

With the "Pull Request" button you can send the change to us to the master repository of the online help, which is used to generate the actual help on susestudio.com.

There you go. Your change has been queued for review by the SUSE Studio team.

Publishing the help

Contributing

As you see, it's really easy to contribute improvements and content to the online help. So if you see something which can be made better, you are very welcome to help there. It's very much appreciated.

By the way, if you prefer a work flow, where you can use your own environment to edit the files, and you can use the full power of git, you can also check out the sources for the online help from the studio-help repository, edit them locally, and push them with git. It will get same result, but with your choice of tools.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Here at SUSE we're always eager to help out the younger generation, especially those preparing for a career in IT. That's one of the reasons why our colleagues in the Paris office held a SUSE Studio challenge with 50 students from Epitech. Epitech is a private institution for higher education in computer science that has campuses throughout France.

The challenge was held last month, on 17 October. The original plan was to conduct the session for 500 students, but in the end we decided to first start with a smaller number to see how things go.

Julien Niedergang, our SUSE product sales specialist, gave an introduction to SUSE Studio to all participants before starting the challenge. The task was to build a customized live bootable USB disk with SUSE Studio, all within two hours. It was a great experience for everyone involved and the students asked plenty of questions. And of course, everybody got to win SUSE goodies in the end.

We would like to conduct more of such sessions globally, so if you would like to conduct these sessions or have links to interested educational institutions, do contact us! You can use the feedlink link within susestudio.com to reach us.

We hope that the students found this workshop useful, and that there will be many more of these sessions!